Arlington Designer Homes
Small Time
Arlington Designer Homes is building
smaller homes with features that pay for
themselves quickly. BY RUSS GAGER
Homes are gathering places, and the best designs facilitate
Arlington Designer Homes is family owned and managed, and principal family members are
actively involved.
" When I find a good subcontractor, I try
to be loyal to him. "
ANDREW MOORE, PRESIDENT
PROFILE
ARLINGTON DESIGNER HOMES
www.arlingtondesignerhomes.com /
that function. Whether stunning McMansions or smaller, more energy-efficient single-family structures do that better is still being
decided in the marketplace, but Arlington Designer Homes' President Andrew Moore is betting on the latter.
"After the Great Recession, you're building different kinds of
houses than you were in 2005," Moore observes. "Part of that is
building smaller houses. I don't know if I'm ahead of the curve or
missed the curve, but we just got a contract to buy a spec house we
built that is 3,500 square feet - smaller than other spec houses on
the market. I made the decision to build a smaller, more energy-efficient house.We've spent the time and effort to organize the space
in a more efficient manner so it feels like 4,000 or 4,500 square
feet even though it has less square footage."
Moore thinks the McMansion style is on its way out for many
homebuyers. "In 2005 through 2008, people were putting in all
this extra stuff because they would start building a house and by
the time it was finished, it would go up in price $100,000, so money was no object," Moore remembers. "People thought central vacuums were essential to have in a house. However, I think those
have fallen out of favor. Now we've come down a bit in house size
and the amount of money people are able to spend and borrow, so
there is some opportunity to build more sensible homes."
Founded by Moore's father,William, in 1983, Arlington Designer Homes is family owned and managed, so the focus groups that
evaluate its home designs are informal and sometimes the principal family members. "We take all these houses to the committee,"
Moore relates. "We want to pass them by my mom, my dad, my
wife and whoever else is in the kitchen."
This process yields practical evaluations of the homes' layouts
that correlate with the way families live nowadays. Arlington's
3,500-square-foot model in Falls Church City, Va., has everything
a family needs, including four bedrooms, four-and-a-half bathrooms, a spacious kitchen and closets, and rooms for dining, recreation, linens and laundry. "It flows incredibly well for the way
that people live," Moore maintains.
Average home price: $600,000 to $1.3 million /
Headquarters: Arlington, Va. / Employees: 2 / Specialty:
Energy-efficient custom homebuilding and remodeling
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www.mhb-magazine.com Winter 2016 Volume 2
REMODELING, TOO
Moore estimates that approximately 75 percent of Arlington Designer Homes' business is new home construction, with the rest